I'm much the same Cap - I don't know where I'll be in 3 minutes, let alone 3 years. I get through by going from moment to moment. I think it's okay to say I don't know, or perhaps these are some thoughts of places/points in my life I think I'd like to be at then, even if you don't have a concrete idea of things. I also think it would be good to take in what you've written above to say that this is what your instinctive reaction was to the question, then when you took a step back you noticed xyz (what you've said above), but trying to write one more focused on you has been harder. It'll be something to discuss.
Take care,
Forest x

Hey Capulet,
That's a lot of thinking you've put in. Just a thought though - a lot of it is about where you envisage the loved ones around/surrounding you to be in 3 years. It doesn't actually explicitly say where you'll be in 3 years. What about delving into your relationships with those loved ones and how you think they've have changed in 3 years time, and how you think you'll feel about that? Or possible if there's something you are doing e.g. studying, how your life may be different (or not) in 3 years etc... Rather than a 'it could be this or this', try a more ' this is how I see things being in 3 years'. You write well. Good luck
Forest x

Hey panket,
Welcome to AS. You're safe here. And although you probably won't believe me, you are in no way an 'ultra-pathetic subhuman creature'. You are You, and that's just fine. See you around the boards.
Forest x

Hi Solace,
Welcome to AS. I'm sorry for what has brought you here, but I am glad that you have taken the step to join us. You will find a great many supportive people on this forum, and a topic for almost everything (including a space for laughter ). There is also a space for your husband to discuss things / ask questions if he too wants to create an account (under secondary survivors). Take your time and have a look around. You're welcome to inbox me if you have further questions. The recovery journey is often long and very bumpy, but we are here to support you.
Forest x

So life moved on and I started school. Being a child with epilepsy in main stream school was quite a new thing in those days - they hadn't long since stopped locking us up in institutions (which is another story) and the general public were terrified and highly ignorant of the condition - still are today - so my teachers weren't exactly looking forward to having me in their classes. It wasn't long before I was being bullied, and I mean extreme institutional systematic bullying by everybody in my year group, and kids from the year groups above me and below me. Apart from absolutely no-one allowing me to play with them at play time, they did wonderful things like whenever I came anywhere close to them or accidently made contact they'd say '***my name***'s lergy, injected for life' and wipe themselves (as though to wipe it off them), then wipe the person next to them (as though to wipe 'my lergy' on to them), and at the same time the kids around the 'infected' child would be doing a little injection gesture as though to protect themselves, and jump hard back against the corridor walls or as far away from me/the infected person as they could get. You'd then see this 'lergy' pass round / down a whole long line of kids (commonly I saw it go all the way round the quadrangle when we were all queuing up for lunch), all behaving in the same way. The ring leader for the boys was both teacher's pet and also lived across the road from me, so there was no let up when I went home. This went on day in day out, week in week out, year in year out throughout my whole school life and on into college. They became more sophisticated as they got older e.g. the silent treatment, refusing to work with me, not sitting next to me, stealing / taking things from my bag and hiding them, tripping me up in the corridor, pretending to be nice when in fact they weren't i.e. on one occasion giving me a type of chewing gum we used to be able to get that was spherical and had a hard exterior, and came in different colours - this one being white. It turned out it was coated in Tippex.
This continued throughout my schooling despite a change of primary school for just the very last term (my parents were at this point desperate, they'd been into the school so many times), then back to the local high school where unfortunately almost everyone had gone on to, and then another change at the end of year 9 (year 9 is ages 13-14) due to no let up despite, unlike the primary school, the school at least tried to do something (in those days there were no anti-bullying policies or major tackling / recognition of such things). In the end, I became the victim and brought it on myself. I did not and do not know how to interact with other people, I never learnt it, so I end up re-victimising myself.
From a really early age I began to comfort eat and, combined with my medication which was like taking a spoonful of sugar ad made you hungry, I rapidly put on weight reaching 19 1/2 stone by the time I as 13. I spent every night (and most of the day) sobbing my eyes out unable to sleep because of the panic attacks. I would wet the bed and was suicidal by the time I was 7, possibly younger. I would swing from the banister rail or get a knife from the kitchen and hold it to my chest, but I could not do it - I'm not sure why. Perhaps my age. It drove me crazy, I just wanted to be dead, for it all to be over - that was my only real passionate thought throughout my childhood and adolescence.

Initial important people - my mum, dad, and 4 year older sister. My dad was a police officer we I was born and until I was 9, and my mum had been until my sister had been born - it was where they met. My dad's background was from a slightly wealthier family from my mum's in that his family could afford to rent a property when he was growing up, whilst my mum grew up in a rather nasty fight for survival type council estate. I probably do need to say something about their backgrounds really.
So my dad was the youngest of 4 children, and my gran (his mum) had come from wealth. She had been raised in a manor house in a posh part of a wealthy county, and her family were the first to on a car in that county. Unfortunately, that bit as a double edged sword. Her parents were killed in a car crash when she was still a teenager, and she was sent to live with an uncle who also inherited her share of her parents wealth (there were 2 brothers as well who were a little older). Unfortunately, this uncle spent all the money, so her fortune and who she could go on and marry changed rapidly. So she ended up marrying my grandad (who I never met, I have to say) who by all accounts was a drunkered, that did minimal work, and spent not just every penny of his but also stole from the children. He was a miser who would count how many sweet he had in his sweet jar and would hit the roof if so much as 1 was missing. The childrens money came from my gran who dispite her privileged upbringing worked all her life as a chambermaid in hotels just to make ends meet and provide a the kids with things such as pocket money. But she also instilled in them the same sort of ideas about money and wealth that she'd been brought up with, so to all of them it was very very important and they are all extremely competative, huge hoarders, and very materialistic. My dad is also the youngest of the 4 and he also isn't exactly the most intelligent person you'd ever meet. So whilst the older 3 went on to grammar school and got themselves 'good' jobs or professions, my dad was a 'mere' PC in the police force. All his childhood ad adult life they constantly babyed him like he could do nothing for himself, including (so my dad says) they would not even let him tie his own shoelaces as a child nor as an adult would they let him fill in a form for his mum - he wasn't good enough or capable enough to do that.
Okay, so leaving my dad's family for now (that's quite a bit of background to be fair!), my mum was the youngest of 3 children. There was a huge age gap between them all, with one being 20 years older than my mum and the other being 10 years older. I don't believe it was a very happy marriage or household (I didn't know either of my grandparents on my mums side) and I believe that the older 2 sisters would often hide my mum from her dad. I also believe that he was accused of assaulting a girl down the road from them, so we can join the dots. They were so poor that they had to use newspaper as toilet roll - she was truly dragged up. But my mum was extremely intelligent, and she passed her 11+, and her mum vowed (my mum was something of a last chance at the marrage baby I'm told and was her mum's, my grandma's favourite) that she must go no matter what the cost. She took a hammering from not just the other kids, but the teachers too who thought she's never pass a single exam, but she passed 11 O'levels as they were then.
Moving on, so both myself and my sister had (I still have) health problems as kids just to make our parents lives fun! At 6 months old (keep an eye on the time frames and ages of people here, although I'm not 100% sure of all of them) I decided it would be a spendid idea to test my dads police driving skills by having my first seizure whilst in the car, turning blue and stopping breathing - I'm told I was in A&E in 30 seconds flat which from where we were is not bad (probably 5+ mins at normal speed). This was followed by over 2 years of dianostic tests travelling to various regional hospitals and by age 2 trialling various medications with dubious side effects. Meanwhile, my sister develops a whole in her heart (actually, you have one at birth, but hers hadn't healed up like it should and had now become a problem) so she was yo-yoing back and forth to different regional hospitals (her specialists were elsewhere!) for diagnostic tests and by the age of 6 (so I was 2) was going under the knife for open heart surgery with no more than a 50% chance of survival. She made it btw and the surgery is quite commonplace today but was pretty new then. So our parents had their hands full to say the least.
Now, I don't remember anything about this bit of my story to be honest. In fact, I'm not entirely sure where the information came from as my memory of childhood is so so shocking. I joined a local group recently for survivers of childhood sexual abuse and they felt that there must be something more my brain is protecting me from given the extent of memory loss I have (I think it's possible, but I don't know if it's sexual abuse - as I said, there's a lot to my story). Anyway, here's what I know (somehow!). Both myself and my sister were sexually abused by an uncle on my mum's side. This uncle was married to my mum's oldest sister (by 20 years). I said something. But, and different people have said different ages to me however I believe my aunt as she has no reason to lie, I was only 3 and 3/4 (ish) at the time so don't remember. My sister however, who was 7 1/2 does though. But what I didn't, and I guess couldn't know, was that this ****** of a human being had abused my mum when she was a teen (remember there's 20 years between her and her sister that he's married to) amongst others, and then when this came out he assaulted her again. I'm not sure when I found that out or even knew about the abuse. But I don't think it was until later years that I associated 2 things. The first was that I asked a question I hadn't when younger - why, if my mum had been assaulted by him previously, would she put us in harms way? You'll need to know more about my family for me to answer that for you, even though for me, any answer is woefully inadequate. And the second thing that dawned on me was that my mum was quite violent toward me as a child (I'll detail/go through some below/in another email), and it of course made no sense what so ever as I was growing up, especially as I didn't see her behalf this way towards my sister. But it was because she hated me (I do not mean she didn't love me - you can do both things) - I'd made her have to face something she'd tried to bury, got her assaulted (I don't know how badly) again, brought it all to the surface for my sister and made my dad aware, and made her loose her sister (they lost contact). I know it wasn't my intention, my intentions were only good, in fact at that age I had no intentions, I simply said it how I felt it. But it did untold damage to her.
Okay, so that's enough for now.

I'm so spaced out at the moment. I was waiting for my taxi home after work yesterdy when a work colleague walked right on past me, spoke to me, and frantically waved at me until she was about 40ft away. It wasn't until then that it registered on me that she was there and what she'd been doing, and all the while I'd be starring almost directly at her (or through her, but in her direction). I'm not with it. I have a golden opportunity laid out before me to apply to a global top 10 university for a subject/to study something I've wanted to do my whole life near enough. But I feel something much less than empty about the whole thing, I just feel exhausted and beaten. I cannot muster any enthusium for anything I just feel so so so exhausted, yet I've only realised this since I found out about the possibility of applying. I've been having much more powerful dreams as well. I wouldn't quite go as far as calling them nightmares, more like negative memories creeping through in my dreams. And I just feel weak. It's almost like I've settled, for a life I could never imagine living and will certainly never enjoy, but I'm just too worn out to keep trying for anything different. My weather forecast - thick fog.

Welcome Sue.
I'm sorry for what brings you here, but you'll find lots of support and there are lots of different forums on AS. There is also a chat room (where you'll often find me!) - you need to have posted 10 times to be able to go in it though, and there is an area for writing a blog if you wish.
I wish you all the best on your journey of recovery,
Forest x

Hi Cg54,
Welcome to AS. This is a truly supportive site, there is no judgement here.
I would just like you to know that I hear you - you are heard. You are not alone.
Sitting with you for as long as you'd like and you need.
Forest x

Thanks Casey. I have in fact only just seen this, but it's ironic that I have since I'm currently off work for 2 weeks with 'depression' (a breakdown - god knows how I'm ever going to face going back which I have to in a week's time). The job itself and the people at my workplace don't help. The job is dull, and my manager in particular has been funny with me about my physical illnesses. Add in that the mental health team have and currently are messing me about and I'm not sure that it's too hard to see why I'm in the state I'm currently in. But unfortunately, I cannot afford to do less hours. Thus the 'work or health'. It's not really a choice to be honest. It's sad you know that that's the world we live in.